Madame Guillotine

by Jason Anspach

  Blaster fire from the rest of Giles’s crew rained down from the landing above as Rechs darted to the lizard, grabbed him with one hand, powered up the armor, and hurled the flailing body of the killer at the nearest attacker above.

  The thing screamed, scrabbly claws flailing and hitting the man full in the face. Both tumbled off into the void, streaking by Rechs with intertwined screams on the way down.

  Those left weren’t interested in what Rechs was offering. The bounty hunter charged after them, racking another charge in the scatterblaster and firing at the first one he caught up to, point-blank in the back. He was already passing the dead man and racking the next charge.

  Only two decided they would stay and fight, or at least try a shot once they reached the next level. A moment of fear and bad aim was all one did with the time that remained in this life. The other one shot Rechs in the chest plate not a foot away from him with a black-market pistol dialed up way past all humanitarian and legal limits. The shot hit like a thunderbolt and Rechs pulled the trigger on his own weapon as he staggered down the fragile steps of the steel staircase and felt the rail at his back.

  Both of the shooters were dead. More were clambering up the stairs, desperate in their escape. Rechs sucked in a lungful of air and tried to get his breath back. It would be bad to have busted his ribs…

  That was the only thought he had as stars swam across his vision and breath refused to fill his lungs. He fell to his knees, knowing he might need another charge pack in the scatterblaster. He racked the slide with effort. And then, slowly, the air began to come. The armor was hitting him with blood-vessel expanders and capsicum to force open his airways. The medical diagnostic in the HUD told him nothing was broken. He’d just had the wind knocked out of him.

  “Hey, Tyrus…” yelled Giles from far above. Rechs heard the man inhale from his mask again. And then cough. Though just a little. The fits had all been part of the act.

  “Hey, man…” crooned Giles Longfree. “I haaaaad to try it, Tyrus. You know. You’re Tyrus Rechs, man. Biggest reward in the galaxy. So… no hard feelings, right? And if you’re thinking about coming up here for me… well, I got a surprise for ya. Not sorry.”

  The staircase began to creak and moan.

  “Little failsafe we built in!” shouted Giles above the rising din. And then his voice died out in the thunder and rumble of landings above collapsing and tearing away their anchoring bolts. Whole sections of the staircase peeled away from the side of the pylon and fell toward the foundry floor below. Each level thundering down onto the one below, the dominoes of a giant.

  Rechs stood. Still shaky from getting shot.

  “No time,” he gasped, “for that.”

  He began to run. Refusing to use up what was left of his jump juice until there was no other choice. He knew he would need it for what still lay ahead. He would need it for those captured legionnaires.

  He stumbled down two levels before the stairs surrounding him peeled off with a titanic groan. The floor below, the vast space that was like cemetery monuments of some giant alien race, was still a good ways down. A fall would crush his legs and break a lot of other bones. Injuries he couldn’t afford, not this early in the hunt for the two leejes.

  So, he made a desperate choice and flung himself for the side of the cavern wall, pushing off the collapsing stairwell at the last second, flying out into the dark void, the low-light HUD imaging everything in blue starlight as he fell.

  21

  She awoke in darkness. Pitch-black darkness. Fear, like a monster, swarmed in and tried to get a hold of her. She tried to remember where she was.

  Then it all came back. The failure in the alley to get the legionnaires back to her SLIC. The “student union.” The piss and spit. The hypo and the drugs. And the memory of the nightmares she’d been swimming through.

  The beating, too. The beating they’d given her when she’d finally gotten to the legionnaires in the alley. When she’d tried to protect them with her body.

  In the drug-induced dream she’d been having she was back with…

  “Don’t,” she said simply to the darkness. She couldn’t afford that here.

  So, don’t, she told herself. Don’t, Manda Panda.

  And even that hurt a little. A lot, if she was really honest with herself. The kind of things you remember when you’re in trouble… those hurt the worst. All the beatings in the world she could take again. Just not the good words spoken to her by the ones who were far away and loved her still. Ones who probably thought she was dead.

  The legionnaires!

  She felt around in the darkness knowing… just knowing that the piss-ant punks had killed them and left her in a shallow grave. That she had truly failed in every way. And in the one way that had been the most important to her. Protect them. Protect the legionnaires until she could get them back to the Green Zone. She’d failed, hadn’t she?

  Failed again, Manda.

  “What?” said a tired voice in the darkness. It sounded dry and hoarse and she could hear the speaker lick his lips in the long pause after. “Don’t what, girl?”

  Lopez. The sergeant in charge of the Legion QRF team.

  Okay, she told herself and got to her hands and knees, feeling around for him.

  “Don’t give up,” she said quietly.

  The sergeant chuckled and began to cough.

  “We’re Legion, girl. We don’t ever give up. We just KTF.”

  She found his ruined armor and the bandages she’d put in place over the wounds she could access.

  “I know,” she said as she checked his bandages. “I was telling me not to give up.”

  And then it was just the two of them in the darkness.

  Okay, thought Amanda. I gotcha, Sergeant Lopez. I got you.

  22

  With one armored glove, Rechs clung to the raw ledge of cut rock he’d grabbed hold of as he escaped the destruction of the stairs, dangling there above the long drop to the foundry floor below. The other glove was holding the scattergun. Too early in the mission to start letting go of weapons. He activated the magnetic carry-hold across his shoulders and stowed the weapon with some difficulty. Now with the augmented strength of both gauntlets, he was able to dig into the rough rock wall and get a secure grip.

  He looked for a way to the floor. Up was no good. That only took him back behind the Green Zone and the Docks. Giles would either have more of his thugs waiting for him up there, or the rat was tipping the military for a reward.

  He began to climb down the rock. It was slow going, and he could have used the jump jets, but he was still rationing the juice. You never knew when you might need the jets later on. He descended, made a small drop, and landed on the dust-laden foundry floor.

  Low-light imaging within the bucket showed him the old casting forms for the hull plating once used to build the mighty warships out there in Detron’s canyons. The graveyard silence made it hard to believe this place had once been close to a state-of-the-art clean room dedicated to stamping out armor plating the size of a city block. Detron’s hull plating had been galaxy-renowned back in the days of the Savages. Rechs had been on Republic ships that had stood up to close-range volley fire from old Savage hulks fielding strange energy weapons the Republic would never have been able to duplicate, and he remembered naval crews reassuring jumpy legionnaires that their ships could stand the pounding and get the Legion in close enough to conduct boarding operations.

  But those were stories long forgotten by the galaxy, or so it seemed these days. Names, too. Sometimes Rechs played games with himself. Memory games. Telling himself he was doing it to keep his mind agile, because even now he was beginning to notice some kind of forgetfulness creeping in. But really it was to honor those old leejes who’d just been young kids back then. Kids following him into battle.

  There was Bill Allen at Veriteaux.

&n
bsp; Randolph Johnson when they hit main engineering on board the Savage hulk Child of Tomorrow.

  And…

  Kris Chambers at Andalore. They called him Joryl, though.

  Timothy Foster, also at Andalore.

  So many at the Carso’s Rift. There were eleven of them. Can you name still name them all, Rechs?

  He got five.

  Richard Long.

  William Morris.

  Ben Wheeler.

  Lawrence Tate.

  Trevor Patillo.

  Five out of eleven heroes the galaxy had forgotten long ago. But that didn’t make them heroes. Their deeds that day did. And those would live forever, because the galaxy had been shaped anew by their actions.

  Rechs pulled the scattergun from off his back once more and stepped into the maze of gigantic and silent manufacturing tools, looming like the ruins of some forgotten city. The compass within his HUD gave him the direction he needed to go in order to get to the city.

  He was sure Giles and his crew had some way into the city. He just had to hope that their route actually did go this way. That the whole trip down here hadn’t been entirely a detour to get to their sad little trap.

  How much of what Giles had told him was true? The wild, feral moktaar? Whatever the Watcher in the Water was?

  As he passed the towering machines, the thud of his boots within the vast cathedral of work was the only noise. Soon the armor’s ambient detection picked up something ahead. Chemical readouts appeared within the HUD. Fire. Smoke.

  Rechs dialed down to stealth mode, stopping to make sure his gear and tactical bag were secure. The crackle of burning wood, augmented by the armor’s sound-detection capabilities, seemed clear and close. And as he circumvented a large crane that had once hauled the ceramic-molded hull plates up to their finishing stations, where they’d be cut by high-intensity lasers and finished off by the nanopoxy and circuitry integration crews, he spotted the small fire.

  A hunched figure sat before it.

  A moktaar.

  The moktaar were fierce simianoids who gave one of the galaxy’s uber-predators, the wobanki, a run for their money in hard times. They also made pretty good engineers. Combat engineers especially. They liked traps and explosives and monkeying around with things.

  “Monkey business,” the Legion called it whenever a combat support team of moktaar sappers came in to do some job.

  So be careful, Rechs told himself. They can be tricky.

  The figure before the fire had his back to Rechs, but it was obvious the moktaar was old. It was hunched over, and long gray sideburns drooped down from its bald monkey pate.

  Rechs approached the fire, letting his boots hit the floor to announce his presence. Chances were if this one could build a fire then it wasn’t completely feral. Even finding wood in a place like Detron was a feat. And… it might know the way out of here.

  Still, time was of the essence.

  Because it was running out.

  At the sound of Rechs’s boots the old monkey turned, sharp fangs bared, giant dark eyes searching the blackness beyond the fire and finding the armored bounty hunter approaching, weapon in hand.

  One paw, crooked and gnarled, went up.

  “Friend?” rumbled the moktaar.

  “Friend,” replied Rechs through the electronically modulated speaker in his bucket. It made his voice sound like a ghost being drowned underwater.

  For a long moment the old simianoid just stared at Rechs, its watery brown eyes questing and darting to find some truth, or lie, in the confession of friendship. Then it waved a paw tiredly and bade the bounty hunter come forward to the fire. It was holding a small stick which performed the gesture along with the gnarled monkey paw.

  “Come,” it rumbled in typical moktaar growl-mutter. “Come close… friend.”

  All moktaar had that speech pattern. Deep and sinister. Low and growling. Except when they went into battle. Then they screeched their war cries and swarmed like a hive of mummy-bees regardless of their losses as they entered some kind of primal rage. Maybe that had been their only defense against the killer wobanki who uttered little as they slaughtered with impunity.

  “Sit by fire,” grunted the old one.

  Rechs approached and scanned the darkness. It wasn’t a trap. Sensors and imaging showed they were the only ones in this section of the foundry. High above them towered an old crane in which the moktaar appeared to have made its home, turning the cyclopean gantry into a junkyard treehouse. And several old chunks of hull spars had been cut into seats and benches around the base of the crane. All oriented toward the fire.

  The moktaar resumed staring into the small fire as though Rechs’s presence were nothing that needed to be considered. Nothing urgent in the least.

  Rechs had no time for this.

  “I need to get through to the center of the city. The Heights.” Rechs looked up. “Above.”

  The moktaar grunted.

  “Know the way?” asked Rechs when the old monkey seemed little inclined to do more than continue to stare into his fire.

  “Can show,” grunted the moktaar. “Joba can show. Very dangerous. Children won’t like it. Sleeper in the Deep… won’t like it either.”

  Rechs pulled out some fixed credits he always kept on him. He set some down on the floor between them. The moktaar picked them up, turning them over and then biting them with what few teeth remained in his old gummy mouth.

  Then he stood.

  “Children won’t like,” he warned.

  He sounded serious.

  23

  “What business are you, hooman?” intoned the elder monkey.

  As a bounty hunter, Rechs had learned to share as little as possible. And though this wasn’t a bounty—more of a rescue mission—it felt the same. He was tracking a target. You really never knew which side everyone was playing for. Double and triple crosses abounded. Especially the closer you got to your target. There were no allies to be had on Detron. So best not to look for any.

  He said nothing. He’d paid his fare. Let’s see how far that gets me, he thought and watched the old monkey and the shadows. The oldster’s use of the word “children” had bothered him. Perhaps there were feral moktaar down here.

  “Fine,” rumbled the moktaar after a minute of silence passed between them. The old monkey ambled up through the vast control platforms that had once governed the pouring operations. It had been maybe decades since this place had seen any work being done. And while everything looked long disused and covered with the ancient dust of inaction… there was a sense that it could all come to life at any moment and renew the work of building war machines. As if there were some big red power button that would throw the central core reactor into life once more and set it all running with manic ferocity.

  Rechs felt a coiled moment of energy crouching in the darkness. He could almost taste it.

  “No mind for, Joba,” grumbled the moktaar. “Hooman bizness is hooman bizness. Always war, fighting, taking… all is hoomans ever do.”

  Rechs didn’t bother to remind the old monkey that the moktaar and the wobanki had been at war for over three thousand years. And that the moktaar had ruined their own home world along with several others nearby as a result. War had never been limited to any one species, race, gender, or class.

  They were climbing a wide set of ancient metal platforms that led up into a vast darkness. Hopefully, thought Rechs, this would lead to some lift that would take him up into Detron itself.

  “Are the Savages back yet?” asked the ancient moktaar, pausing to catch his breath and stare in contempt up at the darkness.

  In the half-light of this place, where running emergency operations lights still ran on millennial batteries, Rechs could now see that the moktaar had the look of a tribal shaman about him. Instead of the moktaar coverall the species alway
s seemed to be wearing, he was wrapped in a threadbare robe that might once have been a packing cloth. In one hand the old monkey was clutching… a prayer chain, maybe, and in the other, his staff. There were carvings in that staff, but Rechs couldn’t make out the details, even with his bucket’s visual suite. Old Moktaari runes and scribble-scrawl.

  Later, when Rechs’s mind had time to focus on the minute details, and he realized that the staff had been made of human teeth, he would think he should have looked at that staff a lot more closely. But for now, he just took it for some ritualistic totem the old one carried about as he wandered in the long dark. Forgotten.

  “Moktaar ran these forges for the hooman wars against their own kind… Savages.”

  Rechs detected movement up in the darkness. High above on a processing computer that was easily three stories high, an impossible piece of tech considered state-of-the-art in its time, something scrambled along an access rail and disappeared.

  He brought up the sensor sweep inside his HUD and checked the scan. Nothing was there. At least not right now. He ran it back. Checked the scan. There had been a blur. For just a moment.

  “Who are the children?” Rechs asked cautiously.

  The old moktaar coughed out a harsh laugh and began his laborious climb up through the platforms once more. At first the bounty hunter thought the old monkey would ignore him as he’d ignored the moktaar’s question. But after a moment the shaman began to speak.

  “The children are the night,” he muttered. “And this…” he lackadaisically swept his gnarled paw and stick across the ruin, “…is their kingdom.”

  He barked his laugh again. It sounded sick and breathless. Like the beginning of a screech.